


Starving (One-Shot)

by LeafyGreenQueen773



Series: Starker Week 2018 [3]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: AU - Homecoming Never Happened, Anorexia, Coffee Shops, Coffee date, Depression, Hurt Peter Parker, M/M, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Protective Tony Stark, Starker, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 06:11:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15261132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeafyGreenQueen773/pseuds/LeafyGreenQueen773
Summary: AU (Homecoming never happened).Peter Parker is eighteen, haunted by the death of Uncle Ben, depressed, and wasting away.  Meeting Tony Stark in a cafe in Queens somehow becomes the ritual that saves his life.For Starker Week 2018 (Day 3).Warnings for explicit references to anorexia, depression, nasogastric tube feeding, hospitalization.





	Starving (One-Shot)

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't intend to write this in such a depressing way. I thought Peter would be a little sad about Uncle Ben; Tony would swoop in and fix everything.
> 
> Eating disorders (and non-diagnosed disordered eating) is no joke, and my own experience with an ED-type mindset made me want to write this, I guess.
> 
> It gets happier at the end, though. So hang in there.

New York coffee shops seemed, on a good day, to be the kind of place where things happened.  People passed in and out, met friends, worked on novels, got their go-to latte to make their day a little better.

On a bad day, it was where Peter Parker went to get away.

He remembered the first day he started drinking coffee, because it was the first day that he’d stopped into the Red Pipe Cafe on a whim.  Aunt May had been on a long Saturday shift at the hospital. The apartment had been...quiet, maybe. Not the kind of quiet that he preferred when doing his homework or sleeping; it was the kind of quiet that rang in his head and reminded him that Uncle Ben had been killed right there in the kitchen.  Instead of sitting in it, he’d thrown on his jacket and walked. Queens Boulevard had been overwhelming to his relatively new sensitivity to input; he’d crossed onto a side street and ducked into the Red Pipe just as it started to rain.

Now, he went there when he felt like everywhere else was too much.  Lately, he’d been turning into a regular. It was better than lying in bed, letting the food that May left for him go cold.  At least when he went out, he could convince himself that his life still had some semblance of normalcy. No matter how loose his clothes became, no matter how dark the circles under his eyes.  The baristas always recognized him. Somehow his coffee order felt like a better marker of his identity than his own name.

Things weren’t going well.

The more Peter struggled, the more Aunt May worried.  She pulled longer shifts at the hospital and tried to pay for therapy.  His favorite foods appeared on the table more often (when he actually had the strength to get out of bed and eat).  Peter felt like a burden. Except his therapist, who couldn’t properly help him because he couldn’t tell her everything about his life, nobody saw the extent to which Peter was spiraling.  He kept his grades up; he put on a facade at school. His friends didn’t see how his ribs were starting to show. It was like Peter and May were living in their own little world, a world where Peter was sinking and May was trying in vain to hold onto him.

The first snow of the season came on a cold Saturday in November.  His aunt was working, and Peter had spent as long doing his physics homework as he could before the silence of the apartment started buzzing in his ears.  He pushed his chair back, grabbed his jacket and keys, and made his way down the stairwell and out onto the street. Automatically, his feet turned him toward Queens Boulevard, and he started on, hood pulled low against the wind.

Although the Red Pipe Cafe was busy, Peter pulled open the door anyway and stepped into the warm, humid room.  Everything smelled bitter, like roasted coffee beans. A low hum of chatter beat against Peter’s ears. He clenched his fist in his pocket, trying to tune out the sensory input.  

“Small flat white?”  One of the baristas, a smooth-skinned girl with black hair in dozens of thick braids, gave him a small smile.  She knew his order and he saw her all the time; he should know her name. But he didn’t.

Peter just nodded, returning the smile with his lips, but nothing else.

He waited by the end of the counter until the girl handed him his coffee, then he turned and scanned the room for an empty chair.  It was packed, with nearly every table and chair and even the piano bench occupied. The only empty place was one half of a blue loveseat in the corner.

Part of him wanted to just turn around and go home with his flat white, but the other part of him knew that he’d lose his appetite the second he walked out of the warm cafe and into the sleeting afternoon.  His stomach hurt with how much he wasn’t eating. Even his face was starting to thin out. If he left, the flat white would end up in the nearest trash can, and he wouldn’t get the precious few calories in the milk.

Suddenly he was standing in front of the empty spot on the blue loveseat.  “Is this taken?” he heard himself say, distantly.

The man on the other half of the couch looked up over the rims of his orange-lensed glasses.  “No, sit, please.”

Peter lowered himself down onto the cushions, not daring to let his back touch the fabric.  Instead, he sat hunched forward, to take up as little space as possible. His hand was trembling around his coffee.

“Come here often?”  It took a moment before Peter realized the man with the orange glasses was speaking to him.

“I guess so.”

“I feel like I’ve seen you here before.”

Peter didn’t answer, just lowered his chapped lips to the edge of the coffee cup and took the first tentative sip.  The moment liquid touched his tongue, he realized it was the first thing he’d consumed all day.

The stranger wasn’t deterred by Peter’s silence.  “I’m Tony.”

Something in the back of Peter’s mind prodded him to interest.  The name was sending up a flag, for some reason. He ignored the instinct.  “Peter,” he responded quietly.

Maybe it was evident that Peter didn’t have much to say, because the man -- Tony -- returned to his work.  He was using a laptop, an impressive one, and although he had a privacy filter on the screen, Peter could make out certain diagrams that the man was designing.  It looked like robotics, something that Peter had always had a mild interest in, until he’d stopped being interested in anything at all.

When Peter finished his small flat white, about ten minutes later, he thought about standing up and walking home.  Instead, he put the empty cup on the floor by his feet, pulled up his hood, and closed his eyes with his head resting against the wall.

Whether he closed his eyes for five seconds, five minutes, or longer, he couldn’t tell.  He only felt the weighted paper bag that was placed on his lap. Blearily he looked down at the bag, then at the stranger.  Tony.

“What is this?”

“A sandwich.”

Peter’s stomach flipped.  “Why?”

“Because you look damn hungry.”

“I have money.”

Tony shrugged.  “Doesn’t matter, I bought it for you anyway.”

Now that Peter was looking straight at the stranger’s face, he realized just how out-of-place this man seemed to be at a random coffee shop in Queens.  His beard was impeccably styled, his clothes expensive and well-cut. 

“You’re Tony Stark,” Peter said.  It wasn’t a question; he wasn’t in awe or even that surprised.  All he felt was sick to his stomach. Without so much as another word, Peter stood, the paper bag in his hand, and made his way back across the crowded room to the door.  When he pushed it open, he looked back for just a second. Tony Stark, a billionaire tech mogul, was sitting on the loveseat, just looking at him through orange lenses.

Peter ditched the sandwich in a dumpster.  His shoes were soaked and frozen by the time he got home.

 

~~~~

 

When December came around, the sun was out in precious little cloudy hazes for a few hours daily until the world inevitably shifted and darkness took up the rest of the time.  It was breathtakingly cold and no matter how much Peter bundled up, his fingertips and his lips were constantly blue.

His old red and blue costume, constructed out of some sweats he had lying around, sat, all but forgotten, in the bottom of his closet.  Whenever he had to exercise in gym class, his heartbeat already pounded thuddingly in his head and chest and neck. The idea of trying to climb walls and get into physical confrontations -- something he’d once idealized -- seemed far from possible.  The layer of muscle that had initially corded around his limbs when he’d been bitten by the spider was slowly waning. 

Now people were noticing Peter losing control, but they didn’t say anything.  Even Aunt May wasn’t saying anything anymore. There were no more appointments with the therapist.

As much as Peter didn’t have the energy to think or walk or even exist, he found himself in the Red Pipe Cafe on another Saturday.  His bluish, thin fingers unwrapped the scarf around his neck as he waited for the barista to take his order.

“Peter?”

The voice was familiar, something he’d heard once in person but dozens of times on television.  Tony Stark was sitting once more in the blue loveseat, as if the billionaire had claimed the spot for himself.  The man gave a small wave, and gestured to the empty seat next to him.

There was no logical reason as to why Peter should have gone to sit with Tony Stark, even if the man wanted him to.  But he was standing once more in front of the couch, then sitting down, his flat white in his hand.

“Hey, kid.  How are things?”

Peter swallowed.  “Normal. How is being Tony Stark?”

Tony laughed.  “Abnormal, at best.  You hungry? You look hungry.”

Without another word, the billionaire got up, ordered a sandwich, and dropped the bag into Peter’s lap.

Peter wanted to eat it, so much.  So he did.

 

~~~~

 

Peter was hospitalized in January.  A tube was shoved into his nose, down his throat.  It hurt to breathe, it hurt to swallow. When he was awake, he talked with Aunt May.  When she thought he was asleep, she cried.

The last thing he wanted to do when he was released from the hospital was to see anybody, but staying in the apartment was worse.  So he found himself walking into the Red Pipe Cafe again. It was a Thursday, and Tony Stark was not there.

When he came back on Saturday, Tony was sitting on their loveseat.  Before Peter could even come sit down, the man joined him in line and bought two sandwiches.  He handed Peter one of them.

The next weekend, Peter drew the curtains and stayed in bed for two days.  But the following weekend, he walked back to the cafe in the bitter cold. Tony Stark was there again, with a sandwich already bought.

It took a few weeks, but a pattern started to take hold.  Peter would show up on Saturday, sometime when the sun was weakly whiting the sky, and a billionaire who probably had a team of personal chefs and access to the fanciest restaurants in Manhattan would be sitting there at a little coffee shop in Queens, with a sandwich for a teenage boy he’d only talked to in incomplete sentences.

In March, Tony asked for Peter’s phone number.  In turn, Peter got Tony’s.

In April, Peter missed two Saturdays at the cafe.  He spent the time sitting in a hospital bed, calories slowly dripping into him.  When Tony texted him to ask where he was, he was honest. Later that day, a package arrived for him that included a stuffed bear and, of course, a sandwich.

In May, Peter didn’t miss any Saturdays.

By June, his lips weren’t so chapped, his hair wasn’t so dull, and his fingertips were no longer blue.

In July, he tried on his old costume.  It hung from his frame, but not as badly as before.

In August, Tony sat down on their loveseat, almost handed Peter a sandwich, seemed to think better of it, and kissed him instead.

~~~~

 

There were some things in life that Peter knew he’d never forget.  He’d never forget the day that he got bitten by a radioactive spider.  He’d never forget the day that Uncle Ben was murdered in their apartment.  He’d never forget the feeling of a tube being forced into his nose and down his esophagus.

But he had new memories, too.  Memories of actually sitting down to eat with Aunt May and seeing her smile.  Memories of warm, summer days that he had the energy to enjoy. Memories of flat whites and holding hands and quiet kissing, and lots of Saturdays on a blue loveseat.  The first, tentative tendrils of Tony Stark creeping his way into Peter’s heart.

Peter still went to the coffee shop on bad days.  But they were fewer and farther between.


End file.
